For years politicians have used “moral issues” to distract, derail & divide the American public from addressing the real problems we need to face.
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Allow me to put my pastor’s hat back on for a few minutes. You see, I wasn’t able to see what was going on while I was wearing it the first time, protesting this and holding signs for that. I held my vote over politicians heads like a ransom note. “You’re either for God, or against God,” I’d say, shaking my fist at the TV, or the radio. I had very definitive criteria for what constituted a godly president verses one who wasn’t. Republican was first on the list.
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I used to say, “I would never vote for a politician who was pro-abortion,” as though that single issue would solve all of the other problems. Whether or not I agree with it, the abortion issue was settled in 1973. Not a single President from either party has ever changed it, and they never will. Getting stuck on that issue keeps us from addressing the other atrocities that are still out there.
Let me give you a little background first.
Believe it or not, there was a time when someone could vote as either a Democrat or a Republican and no one knew what his or her religious affiliations were.
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Believe it or not, there was a time when someone could vote as either a Democrat or a Republican and no one knew what his or her religious affiliations were. A graph (below) created by political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal show, following the Civil war, the polarization began to lessen until you see the two parties virtually similar in ideologies. They remain so until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater, a supporter of civil rights, ran as a Republican opposed to federal interference with states rights. It was that interference that gave black voters equal rights and equal access. Keep in mind that the Republican Party, up to that point, had been the “Party of Lincoln,” but was now being turned against African Americans. The result was a mass exodus from the Republican Party by blacks and an influx of whites unhappy with the civil rights outcome. Lines were drawn in the sand. Nevertheless, Goldwater lost the election by a landslide to Democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson.
Goldwater’s campaign strategist, Paul Weyrich, knew that a large group of untapped voters were religious fundamentalists. They primarily stayed out of politics, but he knew if he could bring them in, the Republican Party would be revitalized. To do so, he had to appeal to them over something they cared deeply about: moral issues.
Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority took center stage, along with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the GOP became God’s Own Party.
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I address more specifics about this in my February 21, 2016 article, When Religion and American Politics Became One. I won’t go into the details here, but it was in the early 70s when we first see God mentioned on the Republican platform. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority took center stage, along with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and the GOP became God’s Own Party.
Ever since, conservative Christians have been led by the nose to focus on hot topic issues, ignoring the fact that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 46 million Americans live in poverty. 16.5% of those people, the poorest population in the nation, ironically, live in the Bible belt, a predominately Republican area. 16 million children, 22% of all children in the United States, live in families that live below the poverty level. Now this is an issue Christians, of all people, should care about.
Additionally, the United States has the largest prison population of anywhere in the world with 2.2 million adults incarcerated as of 2013. That is 1 in every 110 adults. The cost is an annual $39 billion to taxpayers, which pays more than 18 corporations who run about 10,000 of the prisons and “receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one,” according to Global Research.
Not surprisingly, research shows more drugs in more affluent countries and the United States “stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis,” says CBS News. But those are not the people who end up in prison.
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Then there is America’s drug problem. Not surprisingly, research shows more drugs in more affluent countries and the United States “stands out with higher levels of use of alcohol, cocaine, and cannabis,” says CBS News. But those are not the people who end up in prison. Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, confessed in an interview:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The 45-year-old “war on drugs” has disproportionately imprisoned minorities, with 59% of the prison population being black or Hispanic, says the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
As a Republican, I was taught that poor people and people in prison had no one to blame but themselves. They could just as easily as I could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make something of themselves if they wanted to. They just don’t want to.
In addition to a system stacked against them, I outline in my article, Are You Really Pro-Life?, poverty hinders our abilities to make the decisions we need to make to change our behaviors. Additionally, as research shows, poorer people struggle with more health issues than most affluent people. Poor people end up in cycles of fines they can’t afford to pay because they were driving while black.
Still there are some asking, “What about the poor babies being killed? What about the gays and their agenda? What about the decline of morality in America? What about those nasty transgenders raping our daughters in the bathrooms?
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Still, there are some asking, “What about the poor babies being killed? What about the gays and their agenda? What about the decline of morality in America? What about those nasty transgenders raping our daughters in the bathrooms? Isn’t that important?”
First of all, abortions are, again, disproportionately higher among non-white women who sometimes find themselves in difficult situations. A 2005 study found found 73% of women said their reason for an abortion was not being able to afford a baby. That number was 81% of those living below the poverty line. As a side note, abstinence only education does not work. Ever. Not with Christians. Not with non-Christians. Let’s stop pretending and start educating people about sex and STD’s.
You should sit down for this next part. The gays do not have an agenda, other than wanting to live their lives like their heterosexual counterparts. They want to be treated like human beings. You don’t have to like it, or understand it. You do need to stop listening to far right groups, which have lied to you to raise money and caused you to act like fools.
There are as many homosexual lifestyles as there are heterosexual lifestyles. But if you are so afraid of gay people that you refuse to serve them cake, sell them flowers, or feed them in your restaurant you 1) need to get out of business serving the public because there are also straight couples having sex outside of marriage, who have been married multiple times, and have drunken orgies, and 2) you need to take a look at what you really believe about God. Is your god that frightened by a gay person, which he presumable already knew about, that it sends you and him into a panic? Is he too small to address the gay person? Jesus didn’t stop to ask the hungry 5,000 who was gay and who wasn’t. And, yes, homosexuality existed back then. It just wasn’t labeled yet.
Transgender people have also existed since the beginning of time and have already been using the bathroom according to their gender identity without incident. The problem happened when a complex human issue got politicized, using religion to do the dirty work and distract people from the real issues.
What’s not widely known about North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” is that it included a provision to block changes in the minimum wage and it removed protections for employees who were discriminated against, among other things.
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What’s not widely known about North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” is that it included a provision to block changes in the minimum wage and it removed protections for employees who were discriminated against, among other things. It was the proverbial red herring and Christians took the bait.
And if we want to talk about declining morality in America, let’s talk about greed. Our congress continues to get richer while the average American income continues to decline. Between 2007 and 2013 the average net worth of families in America declined by one third, while the senate’s net worth increased from an average of $2.3 million to $2.8 million. The house went from $708,500 to $843,507.
Democrats and Republicans have deep ties with corporations, who are put tens of millions of dollars in their pockets, as you can see by the chart on the left from the Center for Responsive Politics. (Click on the chart for more interactive details.) The general public is put on the hook for outrageous healthcare costs and college tuition, while our leaders make a fortune to keep the corrupt system working for them. They are also not a part of the healthcare system they legislated, and when they retire, they maintain their full salaries.
90% of the media, by the way, is owned by six large corporations and 232 media executives decide what we watch and what they want us to know. If you’re looking for someone who has an agenda, look no further.
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The new “Christian morality” has a group of otherwise good people chasing demons and hunting for devils, while their villages are being raped and pillaged by a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a friendly looking enemy who knows how to speak their language and organize a good witch hunt. In the mean time, the work at hand goes unattended.
When asked what the greatest commandment was, Jesus said there were two: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37). He didn’t qualify those statements with an “unless.” Unless your neighbor is gay, transgender, a Syrian refugee, a Muslim, a Mexican, a Democrat… He just said to love them.
The rampant fear to build walls and keep out the designated enemy is found nowhere in the New Testament. In fact, 1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear…The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” And 1 John 4:20 says, “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.”
The fruits of the Spirit are not hatefulness, fear and ignorance, but “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galations 5:22). “Against such things,” verse 23 says, “there is no law.” But if we keep up with this behavior, one day there may very well be.
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